


Let the devil out

by Dissenter



Series: Narrative law [1]
Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Angst, Body Horror, Changeling!Vanessa, Changelings, Child Soldiers, Comes Back Wrong, Crisis of Faith, Curses, Death Wish, Demon!Fisk, Demon!Matt, Demonic Possession, Demons, Fae & Fairies, Fairy Tale Curses, Fairy Tale Elements, Family Stories, Father Lantom in Rwanda, Father Lantom knows everything, Father daughter killing spree, Folklore, Ghosts, Implied/Referenced Genocide, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Mad Science, Magic, Magical Realism, Mercy Killing, Moral Ambiguity, Multi, Polyamory, Power Corrupts, Power Imbalance, Religion, Rituals, Self-Destructive Behavior, Slight Meta, Storytellers are scary bastards, Storytelling, Toxic community relations, War Crimes, Witch!Foggy, Witches, automatons, blue/orange morality, implied/referenced child murder, vengeful spirit
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-07
Updated: 2016-10-08
Packaged: 2018-04-03 05:54:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 13
Words: 19,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4089436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dissenter/pseuds/Dissenter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Be careful of those Murdock boys. They've got the devil in them." Matt wishes it was metaphorical.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Inner demons

**Author's Note:**

> The Murdock family is under a bloodline curse binding a demon into their souls, luckily for Matt a priest was able to ameliorate the effects early on, but there are still, consequences.

**Let the devil out**

The warning still haunts his mind, “Be careful of those Murdock boys. They’ve got the devil in them.” Sometimes Matt wished his grandmother had been slightly less literal.

It was an old curse, from back in the days when people knew that magic was real and demons walked the earth. One of their distant ancestors was a warrior, or so the story went, a crusader against the forces of darkness. What those forces were was never specified, but what was specified was the fact that in the course of his questing, he made an enemy of a very powerful witch, and with her dying breath (for these things have power), she bound a demon into his soul, and that of his male descendants, to plague his family for all eternity. The curse was such that the demon would take hold slowly, so that he would know the full horror of what he was becoming. Slowly over time he would lose control to the demon, until he became what he hunted, a monster in human skin, killing and maiming and committing atrocities purely for the joy of destruction and the taste of blood.

Now the warrior, so the story goes was horrified by the idea, and considered committing that most final of sins, taking his own life, in order to spare the world from the beast he would become. He was about to end it all, when his wife ran to him and begged him to find another way, she told him that she was with child, and he was filled with horror and shame at the thought of abandoning an innocent child to the fate he was too cowardly to face. So he put aside his thoughts of suicide, and instead went on a quest in the hopes of lifting the curse. He wandered the land for a year and a day never finding what he sought, all the while feeling the demon’s power growing within him until at last despairing, knowing that soon he would be overcome, he swore to search three days and no more, and if upon the morning of the third day he had not come to some solution, he would smother his infant son and drive his sword through his own heart.

On the first day he searched in a village, but though the people there were kind and gave him shelter, they had no cure for his affliction, so he thanked them kindly and took his leave. On the second day he searched in a town, and though many there offered him cures, none were honest, and none had any true solution. Finally, on the third day he came to a small and humble church, where there dwelled a priest, who would later be known as a saint, although which saint has since been lost to the vagracies of family history.

Now this priest looked at the warrior and saw at once the doom that had been laid upon him. And he spoke to him and told him that while he could not undo what had been done, he could ameliorate the curse, if the warrior had an honest heart and an iron will. What the priest did is unknown, and therefore probably violated church doctrine at the time, but its effect was undeniable. The priest’s blessing could not banish the demon, for it had been called by the witch’s last breath (and these things have power), but it gave the man command, as long as his will was strong and his intentions good, and down the generations this held true for all of the man’s male descendants. As a result of the priest’s actions, the demon bound into them gave them powers beyond the ordinary. They were just a little stronger, a little faster, with more endurance than ordinary men, and they were far more resilient. They could take blow after blow and still get back up, and when they did get hurt, it healed faster than it should, and so they were able to continue in their ancestor’s footsteps, as warriors against the darkness.

The trouble was the power came with a price and that price was the devil. The rage, the love of violence, the bloodlust, that it instilled, that wormed its way into the soul until it was hard to say, what was the man and what was the monster. Every one of them lived his life half a breath away from becoming what he fought.

Matt knows what he does as the vigilante is morally dubious at best, but on a basic, primal level he has no choice. The devil must be paid, and the price is always blood. If he doesn’t appease it, it coils its way through his guts and spine and build until he explodes, loses control and the devil takes over until he can fight it back down again. And he wishes he didn’t enjoy it so much, but there is something so satisfying about hearing the bastards skulls crack on the concrete, feeling their ribs crunch under his fists, smelling the copper tang of blood in the air and knowing that he put it there, and it frightens him that he doesn’t know how much of it is him and how much the demon.

He hates how much he loves it, and he knows his father did too. Could see it in the way his father took punch after punch, and was always so reluctant to hit back. How when he did let the devil out he’d leave his opponent bloody in the corner with a fierce grin of exultation, and then come home and be sick in the bathroom.

He’s honest though, as much as he can be, he never lied to that Russian, telling him the real reason he does what he does, telling him that he loves it, and he won’t lie to Claire when she asks if it’s true. She’ll believe what she wants to believe, people always do, though he wonders if she suspects, deep down on some instinctive animal level. He wonders if that’s the real reason she left.

He did lie to Foggy though, even after Foggy found out about the vigilantism, and the guilt of that eats him up inside sometimes. But how would he begin to explain? Foggy doesn’t even believe in magic, how could he begin to explain having a demon bound to his soul without Foggy finally deciding he’d cracked and that it was time to call the men in white coats? And how would Foggy look at him if he did believe him?

Karen, he doesn’t tell for a different reason. There is a trace of the devil in her. Not as much as him of course, most bloodline curses were cast in a deeply misogynistic era, and as such targeted the male line of a family, girl children just got the backwash, as long as they weren’t overexposed to magic or violence they usually didn’t manifest any signs, even then it was usually completely manageable as long as they didn’t kill anyone. It’s best for her if she doesn’t know, the knowledge, can in itself trigger unpleasant things. He just wishes he knew just what kind of curse she was bound by, just in case the worst should happen.

Father Lantom is the only living soul he has told his secret, he’s honest but it’s not the sort of thing that’s easy to talk about. The man had seen things when he was in Africa, he had seen curses worked, and it didn’t take long for him to recognise the signs in Matt, and when he asked outright Matt found that he didn’t have it in him to deny the truth. He was the one who had warned Matt of the dangers of killing, warned that once he started it was unlikely the demon would let him stop. His father had died before he could deliver that warning, and Stick probably hadn’t cared. So for that alone, Matt owed Father Lantom his soul. He might have the devil in him, but he would not let that make him a monster.


	2. Dark mirror

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was meant to be a oneshot, then I rewatched and decided Fisk was also possessed, so I added another chapter. Which has a slightly different tone to the first one but is still a direct sequel.

Matt knew from the first moment he met Fisk. He could smell it on him, the demon, the devil. Fisk is like him, demon cursed. Fisk is like him, but not. Matt knows what he is, and it still takes everything he has to control it. Fisk it seems has no idea what’s inside him, and he smells of old blood. Matt hates and fears Fisk in that way that a man can only ever hate his own twisted reflection. Matt always knew what he was “Those Murdock boys have got the devil in them”. Now for the first time he found himself facing what he could have become if he hadn’t known. If he hadn’t had his father trying to redirect him into verbal rather than physical violence, warning him to keep his head, keep control. If he hadn’t had Stick giving him the hard lessons, showing him how to use the demon, teaching him not to give it an inch, to force it back down with sheer strength of will. If he hadn’t had Father Lantom, reminding him to hold tight to his principles, to never forget why he was fighting. Fisk was a dark mirror of what could have been, and Matt hated him for it, with the kind of bind unthinking rage that Stick had warned him to avoid.

Stick had always told him that the anger gave him strength, but giving into the rage, that was a weakness. Without control the demon would always turn on you, on your allies, would make you careless and reckless when thought and focus were most needed. Going after Fisk he had forgotten that. He had fought Nobu, and Nobu had died, and if he was honest with himself, he had made it happen. He had given the devil too much rope, and it had doused the man in petrol. He hadn’t struck the killing blow, but that had been chance as much as anything. If the fight had continued he would have killed the man, and then there would have been no going back. The more lines you cross the more of yourself you lose and Matt is sometimes afraid he’s already gone too far. Nobu had died and then Fisk had shown up, Matt’s own warped shadow. Or maybe it was Matt that was the shadow, always one step behind and unable to change a thing. The demon in Fisk was far too strong, and Matt was barely standing after his fight with Nobu. It took everything he had, all the unnatural strength and resilience the demon granted him, along with all the stubbornness and force of will that had let him keep it in check all these years, just to get away. He passed out on his apartment floor, suffocating on the smell of his own blood.

Matt couldn’t kill Fisk, can’t kill Fisk. Every time he pictures the man, all he can smell is old blood, and all he can hear is a voice full of reason and malice that belies the force of rage that Matt _knows_ is eating Fisk alive. Hollowing him out as the demon grows fat and powerful nestled comfortably in his soul. That’s what killing does to people like them, that’s what rage, and loss of control does. It feeds the demon, until the human being can no longer keep it chained. Matt will fight Fisk, he has to, knowing what the man is, what he’s becoming, but he won’t kill the man. He doesn’t dare give his own demon that much power. For men like him and Fisk, the demon cursed, violence and death are addictive, once you start you’re never truly clean.

“The devil never forgets the taste of blood, and the more you give it the more it craves.” Father Lantom had told him that, along with stories from his time in Africa, where people still knew magic was real, and where the kind of violence Matt can barely imagine is far too commonplace. Tales of demons in the form of men, who ripped the throats from their victims with their teeth and nails, and raped women still covered in their children’s blood, tales of witches who cursed men, and women and children alike, with wasting sicknesses, and unspeakable hungers, tales of empty men, who walked and talked and acted like calm rational human beings, but were dead inside and would order whole villages slaughtered without blinking, before sitting down to dinner with their families. Father Lantom knows about evil, and curses, and while medieval European magic, may have had some cosmetic differences from modern African magic, it all comes from a common root and some things are universal.

There is a reason Matt is still lying to Foggy, even now. Why he will lie to Foggy for the rest of his life. The world is a dark, dark place, and there is no reason for Foggy to share his nightmares. Knowing these things changes a person, breaks them inside, and Foggy is the one bright whole thing in Matt’s life. The truth would end that. Sometimes it’s better not to know. On the other hand, sometimes it’s not knowing that destroys you, he’s reasonably sure that’s what happened to Fisk, the demon breaking free while the man had no idea it was there to fight. Then there’s Karen Matt knows he should have been paying closer attention to Karen. Bloodline curses can sometimes be activated in girls when they are overexposed to violence, and God knows Karen has seen more than her share recently. He hadn’t noticed though, the way it was affecting her, too tied up in his own battles. He hadn’t told her, and he hadn’t watched her closely enough, and then one day she came into the office smelling of gunpowder and blood, and he knew that whatever her curse was it was activated now. Lies are a mercy, but there are consequences to mercy, sometimes those consequences are more brutal than a quick end ever could be.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There may be another chapter from Karen's perspective, but if there is it'll probably take a while.


	3. Shadow on the soul

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Karen knows more than she believes, about what's happening to her

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really didn't expect to do this so soon, but inspiration struck, and so here is Karen's perspective.

Recently Karen had found herself thinking of her grandfather. She’d been young when he died, only just turned eight, and according to the adults he had already gone a bit funny in the head. He used to tell stories to the children, made up fairytale stories with a fair bit more blood and gore than the grownups strictly approved of. The adults said he’d gone a bit strange in his old age, and not to take him too seriously but there was sometimes an odd note in their voices as they said it.

Karen hadn’t thought about her grandfather in years, but now she kept hearing his voice echoing in her head at odd moments, half remembered warnings about things that only children believed in. She’d like to write it off as just her brain’s way of processing recent events, but it was more than that. She could feel it in her bones.

It started with blood.

_These things always begin with blood._ Her grandfather had said.

It had started with a nightmare she couldn’t wake up from, a dead body on her apartment floor, his blood on her hands, a prison cell, fear. Matt and Foggy had saved her, dragged her out of that nightmare, and she had been too grateful and traumatised to question it.

_It’s a shadow on the soul, a stain that spreads from the first taint of blood until it consumes everything._

Ever since that night she’d been hungry. She wasn’t sure what for. She’d always been a fairly solitary person, but now she found herself clinging to anyone who would let her close. Foggy, Matt, Ben, even poor Mrs Cardenas. She could almost write it off as lingering trauma from the incident, but it was more than that.

_The shadow knows others of its kind. Never make the mistake of believing others do not carry shadows as dark and hungry as your own. There are many, all of them different, all of them deadly. The more power they hold over their bearer, the easier they are to recognise. Be wary._

The man in the mask saved her life. He saved her life and uncovered the truth, and he had her more than half convinced her grandfather was right, because there was something unnatural in his rage and strength. Unnatural and disturbingly familiar, although she knew she had never seen the like before.

_Whether the shadow rules or not is up to the one who casts it. If you have the strength, you can force the shadow to serve you. If you do not, then soon all that remains of you will be a shadow walking in human skin. Just remember that there is always a price. The shadow hungers, and must be fed._

People around Karen kept dying. Ben, Mrs Cardenas, even Foggy got injured, and as for Matt, there was something he and Foggy weren’t telling her about that car accident. People died and got hurt and she kept remembering her grandfather’s stories, of the family’s dark shadow that fed on life, passed down generation to generation, awakened by the taste of blood.

_There are monsters that walk in human skin Karen. Some rage, and some hunger, and some hate. Magic is real, and curses are real, and evil always has a human face. Knowing these things may one day be the only thing that keeps you from becoming one of those monsters, because there is a curse on our family._

She saw Wilson Fisk on the television, and threw up in the wastepaper basket. _Wrong, wrong, wrong._ Her shadow could feel the evil that was eating him from within. He was cursed, as surely as she was, and with far less control. She wondered just when she’d started taking the existence of the curse as fact rather than dubious old story. Possibly, it was the night of the explosions, when she’d realized she could feel the people dying around her, when she’d realized just how sickeningly good it felt.

_The shadow demands blood, and the more you feed it the stronger it becomes. Be careful about the blood you spill, to spill too much is to lose yourself, to spill too little is death._

She also saw the footage of the devil of Hell’s Kitchen, and it confirmed what in her heart she had already known, he also carried a shadow, although he still had enough control that it didn’t hurt to look at him. He was like her then, a human carrying a monster within, not a monster in a skinsuit. For that alone she was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. No-one under a bloodline curse could cause that much death and misery and still remain that human.

_Sometimes it’s hard to tell when someone’s under a curse. Especially if they know what they are and how to control it. It can be hard to tell, but everyone slips up if you watch them long enough. The shadow is always there after all, no matter how well you bury it._

Sometimes Karen found herself wondering about Matt, there was something not quite right there. He was good at covering it but every now and then she could see an edge of inhuman anger under a polite smile, just sometimes she could see the glee of a predator when he knew he had an opponent on the ropes. And then there were the bruises he came in with. Karen is not an idiot, and Matt didn’t get those wounds walking into doors. They were fighting injuries, and they begged the question, what kind of blind, white collar professional, would get into that kind of brawl on a daily basis.

_The shadow is a curse, but a curse brings strength as well as suffering. Remember, in the darkest moments, the shadow may well be all that stands between death and everything you hold dear._

The man looked at her and told her the gun wasn’t loaded. It was the truth, but Karen had access to a deeper truth. That the shadow of death clings to the gun, that it has killed before and will again, because that is what it does. She aimed and fired and the man died, his face a mask of disbelief. It was so easy. All she had to do was call out to the gun’s true nature, and it did what it was made to do. She felt cold and numb inside as she hid the evidence, free of the shadow’s hunger for the first time since the night this all started. She knew it wouldn’t last long. Soon enough she’d have to feed it again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was meant to be a oneshot, but now its got out of hand. I've just figured out how to get Foggy involved in this. It's superangsty and I should probably be shot for trying to corrupt the one innocent person in the marvel universe, but Foggy's going to get a chapter. Hopefully it'll all end there, but I make no guarantees. It's entirely possible this will continue until I run out of characters.


	4. Sins of the fathers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Foggy has his own secrets

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Angst warning. All the angst.

Matt is still lying to Foggy. Foggy knows this and yet he won’t call him out. Doing so would mean admitting that Foggy has been lying to Matt. Or no not outright lying, Matt would have noticed that with his faintly creepy supersenses. No Foggy’s lies have been ones of omission, of things unsaid, undiscussed. It helps that they’ve both been trying to avoid the same subject, its amazing how long you can avoid discussing something that nobody involved wants to talk about.

Foggy knows exactly what Matt is. Even generations removed it is easy enough to recognise his family’s handiwork, and doesn’t that just give him a pang of hereditary shame. He’s never done anything like that of course, not even close. His family don’t deal in curses anymore, the last time any of his relatives had done so was way back in the second world war, when his great Auntie Peggy had cursed the Red Skull to die in cold and despair. She had spent the rest of her life blaming herself for Captain America getting caught in the backwash. That’s the trouble with curses, you never know who’s going end up in the crossfire.

He’d known the first moment he’d met Matt. It was the first time he’d ever felt shame for something he didn’t do. It was totally irrational, you couldn’t blame people for the actions of their ancestors, and anyway if you looked back far enough petty much everyone was descended from some nasty piece of work or other. He knew he had no business feeling bad about something his great to the power whatever grandmother had done. He knew that. He did.

It was just, this wasn’t some abstract stranger dead a hundred years ago. This wasn’t a line in the history books, an old family legend about Great, Great Uncle Jack who used to be a pirate. This was _Matt,_ his friend, with the sweet smile, and the brilliant mind, and the godawful blind jokes. Matt who’d never done a thing to Foggy, or his family, and yet was still paying for an old feud between their long dead ancestors. Meeting him, realizing just who and what his assigned roommate had been, it was like a punch in the face. He’d had to cover up his panic with a fumbling attempt at flirting, and shit he had no idea what he’d have done if Matt had gone for it, because yeah Matt was handsome, but just looking at him made Foggy feel sick with guilt. Huh and they said Catholics had the monopoly on guilt complexes.

In some ways it had got better over time. Somehow he and Matt had ended up friends, inseparable, and after a while he could go weeks without even thinking about the curse. Sometimes he wonders if that makes him a terrible human being. But no that’s not fair. Matt is a whole person, his best friend, the man he loves. To look at him and see only the legacy of a dead woman’s hatred, that would be a far worse offense than letting that hatred slip out of mind and thought. Matt has never asked for Foggy’s pity or guilt, and would probably be fairly pissed off he thought Foggy was blaming himself for Matt’s situation. So for days, weeks at a time Foggy didn’t think about it, and it was like there were no secrets between them. They were going to have their own law firm, and save the world, and grow old still making bad jokes about each other.

But sometimes, not often, something would happen that reminds Foggy just what Matt is, and why. It wasn’t often, Matt clearly knows exactly what he is and has been taught to control it, because no-one has that good a handle on it without knowing, but sometimes it would show through. Matt has a temper, and not the kind that shouts or snaps at people either. The kind of temper that leaves bloody dents in the wall, and bits of furniture smashed on the floor. Just sometimes, Matt’s control would slip, and Foggy got a glimpse of the demon inside, and it would remind him. Ironically it’s at those times he retreated into faith. Went out at night, and prayed to the Old Powers under the trees the university kept around for scenery. Lit the candles and said the words, and tried to stop blaming himself. 

In hindsight Foggy can’t believe he didn’t put it together. Going back over the footage, it’s obvious that Daredevil is under the same curse as Matt, and honestly, how many could there be in Hell’s Kitchen. Then there were Matt’s suspicious injuries that he didn’t ask about because he was too afraid of the answer. It wasn’t like it was even out of character, Matt had always hated injustice, and he’d always liked violence more than he wanted to. He should have put it together, and maybe subconsciously he did, and that’s why he hadn’t asked questions, but finding Matt like that had been a shock, like being hit with a fucking Taser.

He’d been so angry, and the worst part was it wasn’t really Matt he’d been angry with. He’d never hated himself the way he had the night, still grieving for Mrs Cardenas, the sweet old lady he’d got killed, wondering if Matt, his best friend, his family’s victim, was ever going to wake up. He’d been angry because he’d let himself forget. No matter how close he and Matt tried to be they were still lying about the important things, and he couldn’t bring himself to tell the truth. He’d let himself forget, let himself pretend he was just Foggy, and Matt was just Matt, that they didn’t have the weight of their ancestors shadowing them down the years. He’d let himself pretend, and while he was pretending, Matt had lost ground to the demon inside him until he’d had to take to the streets and beat up criminals to quiet it, and now the evidence of Matt’s curse was written in blood all over his apartment. He was angry because he hadn’t wanted to remember, he was angry because he’d let himself forget, he was angry because there was nothing he could do to help Matt. What is done cannot be undone, it’s one of the first rules of magic, one of the first things Foggy and his siblings were taught. You can’t be careless with magic, there are always consequences.

He’d been angry, at his ancestors, and the world, and himself, and when Matt had woken up he’d taken it out on him. He knew he shouldn’t, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself, tearing into him with words, leaving wounds to match the ones on his body. Pretending that the lies uncovered that day were the only ones between them, that Foggy had never hidden anything from Matt, for no other reason than that he was hurting, and he needed to lash out.

Now that he wasn’t pretending anymore, he could see a lot of things more clearly. He could see a shadow haunting Karen’s footsteps, and he wished he didn’t know what it meant. He could see Fisk for what he truly was, curselost and deadly. He could see the healing magic in Claire, cleaner and warmer than his family’s magic. His family had always been better at breaking things than fixing them, even if they did their best now not to break people. Something about that thought caught his attention, brought with it an idea that wormed its way inside his head and wouldn’t leave. He was horrified by the direction his thoughts were headed, but he couldn’t help following them to their end. He could destroy Fisk. It wouldn’t take more than a look, a thought, a focusing of will.

He couldn’t do it. He wouldn’t. There were some lines you just didn’t cross. His family didn’t deal in curses anymore and there were reasons for that, good reasons. If he did this, he was no better than that nameless ancestor that had blighted Matt’s life and his. Curses were unpredictable, there was no knowing who would get caught in the crossfire, but by the Old Powers would leaving Fisk to do as he pleased be any better.  But still his traitorous thoughts kept returning to Fisk, to all the people he’d killed when he blew up the Kitchen, to Mrs Cardenas, to Matt and Karen who were going to get themselves killed trying to fight him. In the end the choice to do the unthinkable was all too easy.

He cast the curse that evening before he went to see Matt. Days later, Fisk’s empire was in ruins, Fisk was in prison, his right hand man had disappeared, and his girlfriend had ended up in hospital before fleeing the country. It had been a simple curse, Foggy saw little point in making things complex. He’d cursed Fisk to fail, and to lose what he loved. He hadn’t quite been able to bring himself to outright curse him with death, but Foggy couldn’t delude himself that his curse hadn’t killed anyone. Karen’s shadow was stronger, and Fisk’s second in command was missing, and when magic is involved coincidences are few and far between.

Now Fisk is gone, and Matt and Karen are alive, and the corruption in Hell’s Kitchen is being purged like poison from a wound, and Foggy can almost kid himself that he did the right thing. He remembers something Auntie Peggy once said

“I will regret what I did 'till death and beyond, but I would do it all over again if I had to. Sometimes there are no good options, and you have to make a choice anyway.” He hadn't understood then, but he thought he did now. He wished Aunt Peggy were still alive, he wished there was someone he could talk to, but if his family knew what he’d done they’d disown him or worse, Matt and Karen had no idea what he was, what he could do, and it wasn’t like he could go to a therapist about this. He wondered briefly if Matt’s priest took confession from heathens, but no, that wouldn’t be right. He still believes in the Old Powers, and there’s too much history there, turning to the Catholic church at this point would be disloyal and insincere. So instead he walks at night, in the parks, and down tree lined streets, clinging tight to all the faint gasps of nature that he finds within the city. It’s an admission of sorts, a way of telling the Old Powers he’s lost his path. They don’t answer, they never do, but he feels better after, so after he gets home he lights a candle in his window and hopes they’ll watch over Matt too.

One day soon he thinks he and Matt, and Karen too now, will need to sit down, preferably with a bottle of Josie’s eel juice, and come clean about everything. But not yet, not while he’s still feeling so lost. They should talk, but he can’t bring himself to start that conversation, and he knows neither Matt nor Karen will. Two of a kind those two, close mouthed, they should talk but he can’t help putting it off. There’s things he just isn’t ready to say.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Basically Foggy is a witch, and a descendent of the witch who cursed Matt's family. He knows this from the beginning. Then he crosses the line that his family has collectively sworn never to cross again and curses Fisk, and people die as a result, and Foggy can't talk to anyone about this.
> 
> I'm a bad person, who does bad things to good characters.


	5. I will fear no evil

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Father Lantom knows evil, and he knows curses

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was going to write another Foggy chapter but then I got to thinking about what an interesting character Father Lantom is and how its a shame we never see more of his backstory, and then I wrote this.

Father Lantom had seen curses worked. He had seen the misery and suffering they brought, and he had seen the misery and suffering that drove people to weave them. It was a bitter brutal cycle, with no winners, and no end, and with each iteration the casualties just kept mounting up. Rwanda had changed a lot of things for him. Before that he’d known nothing of curses, and evil, he’d thought the devil merely a piece of medieval propaganda. Now he knew better. The devil has a human face and is as real as fear and anger.

There was an old woman, when he first arrived in Africa. She never admitted she was a witch, but now he had his suspicions. They had talked, about magic and curses and evil. She had told him that even those cursed had a choice, if they had wit to see it, although it might be sharper and more absolute than the ones others had to face. She had told him about men with demons in their souls that hungered for the taste of blood, and would consume their host if they could. She spoke of people with cold shadows, that craved life above all else, and could kill with memory and intent. He had listened as she talked about curses, of wasting, and ill fortune, and death, of curses that bound a person to one place, and of ones that drove people to wander the earth for ever, he had listened but he hadn’t believed. Not then. She had been dead by the time he admitted the truth to himself.

The first time he’d seen a curse, seen it and not been able to lie to himself about what he saw, he’d been sick on the floor. A boy no more than fourteen, lost to an inhuman hunger, eating anything he could find, not just food but anything, mud, pieces of blanket, bits of wood, metal. But the more he ate the hungrier he became, he hadn’t bothered to kill the chickens before he started eating them. After the first time he bit a person, the monks had locked him in the now empty chicken coop, not willing to just abandon him but with no idea how to help. By the time the red cross doctor arrived to have a look at him he had eaten half of his own fingers and toes, and had to be physically restrained from attacking. The sight of a child, teeth stained with his own blood, weeping and raving and snarling at anything that moved, lunging teeth first at anyone who got too close had been too much for the young priest. He’d managed to leave the room before throwing up. They kept the boy restrained and sedated but his screams of hunger still echoed through the village, and the smell of his festering self-inflicted wounds had permeated the mission. Nothing they tried had helped, medicines, anti-psychotics, exorcisms. Maybe a professional psychiatric hospital could have done more, but they were lucky to have clean water, and bandages. In the end one of the older monks had sent the others out to fetch supplies from the market. By the time they came back the boy was dead and buried. No-one asked what had happened, sometimes the only mercy is a clean blade.

After that Father Lantom believed. Before he returned to the states he saw the aftermath of many more curses. He saw men who cared for nothing but killing, who had to be kept restrained, except in the heat of battle, for fear they’d kill their own allies, he saw children rotted alive in the backwash of curses aimed at their parents, he saw women trapped in villages of the dead unable to leave and unable to die. It was enough to see why the old testament said Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. Or it would have been enough, if he hadn’t also seen the people driven to cast the curses. Women raped in front of their dead children, then abandoned to bleed out with nothing left to them but vengeance, little boys cast adrift from home and family and hope, forced into a war they didn’t understand and ordered to kill and curse a faceless enemy, teenaged girls kept as soldiers pets, passed around until they died in childbirth, with no other weapon left to them but the magic of hate and desperation. Some men would have lost their faith in the face of such evil, Father Lantom retreated further into his, because the thought of facing such evi alone was more than he could bear.

_Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me._ And because he stood firm and didn’t crumble in the face of all the horror, he was also able to see the good. The incredible grace that humanity was capable of. There was a woman cursed with a demon’s rage who refused to bow to it, who would fight to protect her home and children, but never killed a soul, refused to cross that line and let the monster win. There was a man, an ex-child soldier, a witch, who had cursed people and killed people on the orders of his commander until one day he had, had enough and ran, ran until he couldn’t run any more and spent the rest of his life working as a healer, alleviating curses, and treating wounds and sickness. A woman who cursed herself with a deadly touch to escape her attackers, and travelled the country granting a painless death to the mortally wounded on the battlefield. It helped, seeing that even under impossible conditions, people still tried to do the right thing. All the same, he was still kept up by nightmares of his time in Rwanda.

He’d thought he’d left all of that behind him, when he came home. It had been a long time since western society had faith enough for magic. He should have known it wouldn’t be that easy. Some curses were personal, limited to one target, and whoever else might get caught in the backwash, but others got into the blood and bone, unto the thousandth generation and beyond. Western society might be too sceptical for the weaving of curses, but civilisation is only ever a thin veneer over a history far longer than reason and rationality, and what is done cannot be undone, even if it was done a hundred, a thousand years ago. After all the only thing really separating the first world from the third world, was a few hundred years of technology and a whole lot of money. Curses had been laid in the past, and some of them would never fade.

When Matt had walked into his confessional he’d seen the signs, and Matt’s confession had been all the confirmation he needed. The devil in him indeed. Still Father Lantom had allowed himself to hope, yes there were clearly people under curse here but surely here in America people wouldn’t be faced with the desperate situations that would cause those curses to be fully unleashed.  He had forgotten, civilisation is only ever a thin veneer, and in Hell’s Kitchen it is as thin as it gets. He was watching the television when Wilson Fisk appeared, and his heart nearly stopped. The man was demon cursed, and the demon had long since won. Rage walking around in a human skin, with a pretence at manners and civilisation that only made it more dangerous. Curses call out other curses as well, like to like, and Father Lantom fears for Mathew, who was trying so hard to keep the monster in check. Matt knows what Fisk is, how could he not, and his conscience will not allow him to let such a creature run free, but every moment he spends chasing Fisk brings his own demon closer to the surface. Father Lantom wishes he could help him, but some battles can only be fought alone, and all he can give the man is a warning about the dangers of killing. He hopes Mathew listens, the world needs good men like him.

Later Father Lantom has his suspicions about Fisk’s fall. There was something about the way everything fell apart for the man so quickly that spoke of a curse to Father Lantom. The world is a darker, more brutal place than it was when he first returned to America, alien invasions, and killer robots may seem amusing in comic books and films, but he has waded through the rubble and bodies of the aftermath and he knows it is as bloody as war always is. The world is a darker place, and it is in the darkest moments that people are driven to place curses. Fisk’s fall went too quickly and absolutely, and Father Lantom no longer believes in coincidence. He knows Matt didn’t do it, he might have the devil in him, but he is no witch, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t know who did. He won’t ask, Fisk was a monster, and while he has no way of knowing just what drove this particular witch to curse a man, he suspects it was an act of desperation rather than malice, a curse done in malice would have gone further than this one did. He can’t condone, but it isn’t his place to condemn, and he just prays that will be an end of it, even if he knows deep down it won’t be.  The world is a darker place, and he suspects it’s only going to get darker. There will be more blood and curses before all this is done.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have this inescapable feeling that this fic has gotten away from me. I started it and now I can't seem to stop, I now keep getting this traitorous urge to find out how the avengers fit into this universe.  
> Oh well. This verse is a lot of fun to write. I guess I can roll with it.


	6. Light a candle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Foggy does magic. The avocados learn the importance of honesty. And moral crises become infinitely more confusing when your Gods operate on a blue/orange moral scale

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I planned for this to be more angsty than it is. It gets a bit fluffy at the end. Think of it as the calm before the storm, 'cause i'm thinking of focusing the next chapter on Fisk and Wesley.

Four points of the compass, a bowl made of iron.

Simple steps. Routine. No thought required. The rituals of childhood always come easiest. He slices open his thumb and lets drops of blood fall into the bowl. One, two, three. Then he lights the candles and casts his mind into the flow of the world, chasing a connection to the powers he has always followed.

The old powers will not condemn Foggy’s choices. Why would they, they have no concept of sin, of right and wrong, good and evil. Those are human concerns, for human judgement, and the old gods are not bound by them. Foggy has broken the laws of his family, human laws, for a human age, but the world is growing darker, and humanity’s hold on the world gets weaker every day. There is after all more than one kind of law. There’s the obvious kind, the human kind, written, and encoded and woven into the fabric of society. But there are also older laws, bound into the bones of all living things, bloody laws for bloody times, and these days the world is stained red. By the old laws, which are the only ones that truly bind the old powers, Foggy was right to curse Fisk. He protected himself, and those he cared about, he eliminated a threat, and his gods do not understand why he weeps.

…

Oak and holly, bound together with red silk.

This stage is more complicated, and Foggy has to focus to keep a grip on the fratricidal powers of summer and winter. This is change magic, transformation and conflict, and it cannot be learned by a child. It is a thing taught to girls the first time they bleed, to boys when their voices break, and it is dangerous as adolescence always is.

Childhood’s end, if his family find out what he has done they will not forgive him. He weeps for what he has lost, but he would not undo it. By the old laws adulthood begins when a man no longer lives by his family’s rules, but by his own choices. Foggy chose to curse Fisk, to protect Matt, and Karen, and the city the three of them love. No-one told him growing up would hurt this much, but he will not recant that choice now.

…

It’s midnight, and that’s for Matt, the dark hours before dawn. Now more than ever it seems fitting. Matt fights in the darkness, always. Daylight is a stranger to him in more ways than one, and so the night gives him power. The half-full moon, that stands for Karen, and not just because she’s a woman. Moonlight casts long shadows after all, and they all know what haunts her steps. As for Foggy, he conducts this ritual at his own hearthside, because he is the anchor, because he is _home_ for the others, when they have nowhere else to go. Because he loves them and that love is his defining feature. If Matt is blind uncompromising justice, and Karen is the cold light of truth, Foggy is home and family and love, and so the hearth fire lends strength to his magic.

He had told Matt the truth. It took half a bottle of eel juice, and more tequila shots than he likes to remember, but he told him. The whole bloody mess of it, from his ancestor’s spite to his own powers, and finally what he did to Fisk. Matt had been so, so, quiet, the whole time. When Foggy had finished he had got up and left without saying a word, and Foggy knew that some muggers were going to end up in the hospital that night. Matt had left without saying a word, but the next day he had come to Foggy bruised and calm, and told him it was time for the both of them to come clean to Karen. Before the secrets and lies ate the three of them alive.

When they told her she wasn’t surprised, angry but not surprised. None of them were really any good at keeping secrets, so they’d all known enough to be hurt at the lies. That was the trouble, they’d known enough to hurt but not enough to support each other. Lies and secrets, secrets and lies, when did the world get so dark. There’s a demon behind Matt’s sardonic smile, there’s a shadow in Karen’s voice, and Foggy has walked eyes wide open into the darkness. They sat in the office and watched the sickness spread, and then they lied through their teeth about it. Every one of them knew the others were lying, hiding, but none of them were willing to break silence. If they hadn’t come clean it would have broken them. The truth burned, but it was a clean flame, better than the festering rot of lies. With everything out in the open they could start to heal. Lies or love, you cannot have both.

…

The first rule is the rule of three. Once, twice and then once more. A thing is never done, until it has been done three times. Three heroes, Matt, Foggy and Karen. Matt’s demon, Foggy’s magic, Karen’s shadow, three points of entry of the old magic into their lives. Three is a powerful number, and love is a powerful magic, Foggy can use that. The way the world is headed, they’ll need every advantage they can get.

There is after all a third kind of law, its strength waxes and wanes according to principles nobody knows. The law of the narrative, the story. The signs are clear to see, for those who know to look. The world doesn’t make sense anymore, not by the laws of rationality and reason. Heroes, and monsters, and threats to the fate of the world, the way science has twisted itself into something like magic, the way magic has stepped out of the shadows. At some point during the last seventy years or so the world shifted back towards fairytale rules, where almost anything is possible, and reality twists around narrative necessity.

Three candles, one for each of them, and ribbons binding their wrists together, red for Matt, blue for Karen, green for Foggy, as he binds them together with a magic deeper and more personal than any curse. It’s a declaration of love, and a promise of loyalty, and a spell of protection all bound up into one. A marriage in the oldest sense. None of them had hesitated when Foggy had suggested it, and as he felt the spell settling into place he had never felt safer. It turned their love into a shield and a support. A defence against the coming darkness, and a comfort in the face of remembered sins.

The old powers will not condemn him, but they are not human, and he has never felt their alienness more strongly than he does now. There is blood on his hands and his gods can neither condemn nor absolve him for it, to them it just _is,_ to them killing is part and parcel with living. Morally neutral as only forces of nature can be, he can find no comfort in their embrace. He extinguishes the candle, it was never their understanding he sought, never theirs. He looks up, at the human faces of the two people he loves most in the world, and he knows that they know what he’s going through. It’s enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter will probably be brutal. I kinda want to see how bad I can make Fisk and Wesley and still have everyone feel sorry for them.


	7. Blood and thorns

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vanessa is human, biologically speaking. It's surprising how much of being human is culturally determined.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes I know I promised Fisk and Wesley, but then I had this idea about Vanessa, and I couldn't get it out of my head. Because there is clearly something slightly off abut her reactions to events in the series, and i've decided it's because of cultural relativity.

Poison in the drinks, wasn’t that just a blast from the past. She could almost have laughed, turns out history really does repeat itself.

_Laughter like silver bells, carefree and innocent, and utterly devoid of mercy. Knowing that it didn’t matter to them if she lived or died, because it was so funny to watch her choking. She survived. Survived and learned._

She concentrated on breathing. She could survive this, she had the strength, and after years in the courts there was enough magic in her blood to burn it out provided she kept breathing. She heard Wilson shout as she hit the floor.

_They always send you back in the end. That was one of the rules. A year and a day, ten years, a hundred, but they always send you back in the end. The fair folk might be capricious, and careless, and often cruel, but they keep to the rules. It's in their nature. They always send you back, but they never send you back whole, and the longer they keep you the more you lose. She doesn’t regret it really. Regret is such a human emotion, and she has lost a little too much of her humanity to feel it._

She came to, in a haze of antiseptic smell, and bone deep pain. Stupid, careless. She let her guard down. If this had been the courts she would be dead. She should have known better. Wilson was by her bedside, and that was different. Someone watching because they cared, because they were afraid for her, rather than out of curiosity or amusement. It was nice she supposed, if a little confusing. It was hard sometimes, understanding human social norms. Sometimes Vanessa thinks she spent too much time at court. Too much time, and far too young, it’s amazing how much of being human has to be learnt. She’s good at faking it, but culturally speaking she’s not really human any more. She was after all, so very young when they took her. Five years old when the Fair folk carried her away, left a piece of wood under glamour in her place. They sent her back ten years later as far as she could tell, nearly a woman grown. Certain aspects of humanity got lost along the way.

_Surprise on Wilson’s face, as she hands him the gun. He doesn’t understand, not completely. It feels odd, after all no lord of the courts could possibly have failed to recognise the gesture. The display and then surrender of a weapon. A declaration of her own strength as well as a sign of submission to his strength. She had sworn herself to him, and he hadn’t even realised. She actually quite liked that. You didn’t survive growing up in the courts without grasping the value of knowing things others do not. Even if those others are your own allies._

Wilson had sworn never to lie to her and he kept that promise. That counted for a lot. Oaths were important to the fair folk, oaths were important and lies were hated, because the fay could not tell a lie and could not break an oath. Deception, manipulation, half-truths, and treachery were all a part of life, part of the game, but not lies, and not broken promises. The fay have no tolerance for powers they do not possess.

_The human man does not die. Vanessa watches on curiously. She’s not entirely sure what he did, just that he broke a promise to the Lady and had to be punished. The Lady made him swallow a seed, and then tied him to the ground in the middle of the courtyard. The seed had been growing, there are little green leaf buds poking out of his ears and nose and eyes. He's blind now. He had screamed at first, but then a thick green stalk had pushed its way out of his mouth, and he couldn’t scream any more. The leaf buds coming out of his eyes are stained red and there are tears of blood tracking their way down his face. Vanessa decides then and there that she will never break a promise._

Wilson was worried about Wesley. His strong loyal champion, his sworn knight. This she understood. The loss of a loyal subordinate was more than a matter of personal grief, it was an attack, a challenge that even the cruellest of the fair folk could not leave unanswered. The killing of a second in command, well, that was a declaration of war. It was a shame, she had rather liked Wesley, he was loyal, competent, and respectful, an asset to any court and he made sense in a way that few humans did. It was a shame he was dead, but she knew a knight of his quality would never have caused his lord such distress while he was alive.

_Green, green, green, red. The natural colours of the glade stained with an unwelcome intrusion. Vanessa is seven she thinks, or perhaps seventy, it’s hard to say. Time moves oddly in the summer country. She is old enough though to know to stay quiet and inconspicuous right now. The whole court is silent, as the Lady stares at the bloodstained remnants of a coat, and the sky turns dark in response to her rage. When she speaks it is with the voice of the thunderclouds, and the court prepares for war._

Wilson tried to send her away. It was yet more evidence that he didn’t really understand, but she didn’t care. For his consort to abandon him in times of danger would be a sign of weakness. It could undermine everything. Vanessa knew better than to show fear. Those who show fear are _prey_. Besides, she may not have been raised human, but blood and bone she _is_ human. Human enough to love, and she does love Wilson. She knew he was still human enough to grieve, despite the demon within him. She was his consort, so it was her task to remind him not to falter, to find their enemies and make them _pay_. And she wished she was well enough to help him, because she had liked Wesley, and his death was a challenge to _her_ court, and while she knew Wilson’s vengeance would be swift and brutal, he was too straightforward to match her cruelty. Still it would have to do, speed of response was more important than personal satisfaction. Wilson would take care of it.

_The first time she sees him she knows he’s dangerous. That’s half of why she’s so drawn to him. She’s had human lovers, ordinary ones, happy, simple, normal people, and they were amusing for a while, but they didn’t feel real. She knows Wilson is dangerous, and it feels achingly familiar. There’s the demon of course and that’s intriguing enough, that edge of blood-soaked violence that calls out to the predator in her, but it’s more than that. As quickly becomes apparent on their first date. He is more than just violence and personal strength. He is a player and she knows this game, the manipulations, the shifting alliances, the calculated cruelty, and the plots within plots. It’s like coming home. She chooses to become his consort, because the game is a part of her, and she’d missed it like breathing. She loves him because in the midst of all that he is an artist, a weaver of dreams. The fay have always loved art. She is fay enough to be drawn to art and artists, fay enough to be no artist herself, that’s why she’s an art dealer, that’s why she loves Wilson._

Their plans went awry. Their enemies were stronger and more determined than she had realized, and perhaps it was partly Wilson’s fault for not sharing the whole picture with her, his consort but she couldn’t blame him. After all he still thought she was an innocent. A misapprehension she will have to correct once she has rescued him. At any rate they were not done yet, their enemies were fools to leave her free. Their court may have suffered a setback but they were not broken. She would rally their supporters and build their strength and rescue her lord from their enemies. It would take time to rebuild, but their vengeance would be bloody. She learnt that much growing up, forgiveness had no place in the courts. The courts taught her many things. She had to unlearn a lot of them after she returned to the human world. Or at least pretend to unlearn them, there’s some lessons after all that can never be truly unlearned, and so when it turns out that the human world is not truly so different from the courts, she is well prepared.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case it wasn't clear, Vanessa was stolen by the faeries (not the nice kind) when she was five and didn't get back until she was fifteen, meaning that she is biologically human but culturally she isn't really, so her moral code and the way she thinks about things are more than a little bit off.  
> Fisk and Wesley next chapter I promise.


	8. Make it real

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wesley's past

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok this is mostly Wesley with a bit of Fisk, i'm not entirely happy with it but it lays the ground for the next chapter so it'll do. Wesley is surprisingly hard to write.

He wasn’t real. He'd been taught that all too well. He’d been ten years old when his father had outright told him, although he’d had his suspicions for a long time before. He could read after all. He did know that real people aged and grew over time, that they didn’t spring fully formed from their father’s workshops. Real people bled red and feared death and were _loved._ He was just a toy created by a mad genius, cold inside and separated from the world.

He hadn’t been allowed outside as a child, and for all that his body was fully formed from the beginning, he had still been a child and had to learn and grow up as real children do. He hadn’t been allowed outside so he’d submerged himself in books. Most of them were simple escapism, stories of pirates, and talking animals, a fair number were factual, dictionaries and encyclopaedias, and atlases. It didn’t matter, he loved all of them, insofar as he was capable of a thing like love. He loved the books, but in amongst the escapism, and the random knowledge, scattered too carefully to have been left there by chance were pages full of poisonous truths dressed up in pretty tales.

The first he read before he even understood the nature of what he was. Hidden amongst the children’s books, disguised as one of them. He hadn’t been old enough to understand, but still the story had haunted him, so maybe he had understood more than he realised. Pinocchio, the story of a puppet brought to life, but still not human, not _real,_ and because he was not real bad things happened to him, and he did not truly exist to the outside world. Wesley hadn’t liked that story.

He’d been older when he read Coppelia, old enough to know exactly what he was, and why the story disturbed him. His sister was younger than him in years and yet she understood before he did. The doll wasn’t _real_ she was just a thing, a symbol to be used, desired, and impersonated, and eventually cast aside. The real people got their happily ever after, while she was forgotten. It hadn’t been until years later that he’d finally realized just why that knowledge had come so easily to his sister, a child born fully formed with the body of an adult woman, beautiful in all the ways real men dream of.

His father was dying by the time he read Frankenstein. Sister had found it first, on one of his personal bookshelves. It was a hard book to read, hard truths to come to terms with. He’d found it on Sister’s bed, after she’d taken the book’s ending as inspiration. He’d felt nothing when he found her charred remains on the lawn, after all she hadn’t been real to begin with. He’d found the book on her bed, and he’d read it, more out of curiosity than sentimentality. It didn’t make for easy reading, it contradicted all the truths that he had lived his life by, brought _everything_ into question. He had always thought he wasn’t real, and the voice of the monster made him doubt that for the first time in his life. Just because he had no mother, because he was created by the madness and genius of one man, because he had no heart and did not age, did that really make him any less real than anyone else. He had always believed it did, and yet the book showed that the isolation, the rage, the desperation of the monster, like him created not born, were as real as anything his creator felt. He saw himself in the monster, and yet for all the monster was a fictional character there was something undeniably real about him.

Frankenstein contradicted everything Wesley had thought he knew, and yet the words of it cut too deep to be dismissed. If there was one thing Wesley had learned over the years it was that no lie could ever cut half as deep as the truth. When he finally reached the end, and the monster swore to burn himself Wesley couldn’t banish the memory of his sister’s charred limbs and desperation. He had thought she was unreal, just like he was, but in the end he couldn’t believe that. The monster had been real, tormented and twisted by the world as he was, how could he deny his own sister the same acknowledgement.

That was the point when Wesley’s world started to unravel, because if his sister was real, that meant _he_ was real, was a person. And that meant father, creator had lied, all his life. Lied, and twisted, and caged him here, and driven Sister to suicide. He had never hated father before, hadn’t even known he could, but in that moment of realization he hated him. And for the first time in his life he was free of him.

Father had been sick for a while, invalid, unable to get out of bed. Wesley and Sister had shared nursing duties, up until Sister had finally set herself free. That final morning Wesley had walked into father’s room and simply stood in the doorway, made no move to help him in any way.

“I am real.” He said, calm and quiet and resolute. Father looked like he wanted to say something, but Wesley didn’t give him the chance. “I am a real person, you may have created me, but you do not own me. From now on I choose who I serve.” Then he had turned on his heel, and walked out the door. He never looked back once. It would be weeks before father’s body was found by neighbours curious about the scent of decay.

Wesley was not a real human, but he was a real person. Wilson had been the first man he’d ever known who’d accepted that truth without blinking. Who’d known what Wesley was and still called him “friend”. They knew each other, to the core. Wilson had seen past the hollow indifference that had been drilled into him over the course of years, had seen that human or not he could still feel and care and make his own choices. Wilson valued his support precisely because it was freely given. And for his part Wesley had seen past Wilson’s size, and awkward speech, and the demon who raged inside him, and recognised a man both brilliant and driven. Their bond had shaped Wesley’s entire existence, and he supposed that if there was ever anything worth dying for it was that. But that didn’t mean he wanted to die.

Fuck, he really didn’t want to die. All he could think of was Wilson, brilliant and damaged, standing by the hospital bed of Vanessa, who Wesley suspected was both stronger and less human than she first appeared, and yet somehow couldn’t help liking anyway. It was all he could think of and it burned him inside, the knowledge that he'd never see them again. He thought of the empire they’d built up, the plans they’d had, the hopes, and he saw them all crumbling into dust. He didn’t want to leave them. He wasn’t ready, not here, not now, they still needed him. He wasn’t bleeding red but he was bleeding, and he knew he was dying but he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to. There was still so much to do, to see, to be, and it was all slipping away through his fingers. Even through his fear, and desperation, and regret he still had to smile at the irony though. He’d never felt so real, as he did in that moment, when the bullets hit, and he didn’t want to die.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case the hints were too subtle, Wesley is basically an automaton. I deliberately left the details ambiguous because they aren't relevant to Wesley's state of mind. (in case you're curious though, I was picturing something steampunky made to look like a human) . And yes Wesley's sister is a sex doll, and she does commit suicide.


	9. Dance with the devil

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Back to Matt's POV for a bit

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not entirely happy with this one, but I needed to work through Matt's perspective on all the stuff that's happening, and this is what I got.

Matt isn’t sorry. Not about the vigilantism, anyway. He is a bit sorry about the lying, lying always feels a little like cheating, since most people can’t lie to him, although really under the circumstances it’s a necessary evil. But he is not at all sorry about the vigilantism. In his darker moments he’s not even sorry about the devil, because the devil gives him the power to do what needs to be done, although it makes him sick knowing how much it enjoys the smell of blood.

_Sitting outside the church, but he can’t quite bring himself to confess. To seek absolution you must first repent._

He’s not sorry, because the world is broken, broken, broken, and it makes him so angry sometimes that he can barely breathe. He wonders how the world has got to a point where it is more socially acceptable to turn a blind eye to the evils of the world than it is to try and stop them in whatever way you can. What kind of world is it where a man can abuse his daughter nightly and get away with it, what kind of person can listen to it night after night, and _not_ put the bastard in the hospital.

_There was a bottle of eel juice, and then another, and then altogether too much truth. Matt was never the only one with secrets_

He is sorry about Foggy though. Foggy keeps blaming himself and he shouldn’t. He thinks Matt does this because of the devil, thinks that his ancestor ruined Matt’s life, and yeah the devil is part of it but mostly he just can’t stand to listen anymore. He just doesn’t understand how people can be so wilfully _blind_. He hates them for it sometimes, the way they can just choose to close their eyes and look away. It’s something he’s never been capable of. Even before the accident made it so that he could hear people screaming from blocks away. The devil gives him strength but it’s human empathy that drives him. Foggy comes clean about being a witch, about being the descendent of the one who cursed him, and the look in his eyes horrifies Matt. Like he thinks Matt will hate him/leave him/turn on him, for something he didn’t do, would _never_ do.

_A third bottle of eel juice, tears, and reassurances, and the two of them collapsing into unconsciousness fully clothed on Matt’s bed. Matt holds Foggy tight, and makes him promise not to even think of blaming himself._

He asked Father Lantom once. How can people know there is such evil in the world, people being brought and sold like meat, curses on innocent children that made them tear their own skins off, rape and murder and dark magic and a thousand other atrocities, and yet do nothing, refuse to even think about the situation? There are no satisfactory answers, the Father suggested it may have something to with despair, and denial, and empathy fatigue, but the truth is he doesn’t know either. The Father has faced things even Matt has not, seen the worst of humanity, and still done what he could. He has never been one to walk by on the other side. Maybe that’s why he’s never seriously suggested that Matt stop. Or maybe it’s just that he knows what Matt is, and is reluctant to interfere with someone else’s coping mechanisms. Matt has never asked how Father Lantom dealt with some of the things he saw, won’t ask, some secrets are best left buried in the mass graves they were born in.

_Talks over lattes that should really be had over strong spirits. Usually it’s Matt who speaks, about the people whose heads he smashes in with fists and blunt instruments, but sometimes on certain days it’s Father Lantom who needs to talk, with someone else who knows what magic can do. It’s those days that Matt really wishes he could put something stronger into the coffee._

Matt isn’t sorry, maybe he isn’t changing anything, but at least he isn’t just rolling over and letting it all happen. At least he still has enough humanity left to try, and God knows humanity has been in short supply lately. He is one man alone against the evils of the world, and maybe he can’t change the big picture, but he can change the details. Wash away a thousand small cruelties with blood, and rain, and a snarl in the darkness “Say you’re sorry, or I’ll make you fucking sorry.” The world has gone wrong, and maybe he can’t fix that, and maybe he can’t make a system bleed for the suffering it causes, but he can bloody well make the people who feed off it bleed. People who make things worse in a thousand petty ways because it’s easier to drag others down for their own benefit, people who take a look at a world filled with human misery and decide that the logical response is to try and turn a profit out of it. People who give in to the monsters and demons inside of them, both mundane and mystical. He beats the living daylights out of human traffickers, and child molesters, and evil witches, and demons who walk in human skin, and when he goes to church he confesses but he doesn’t ask absolution for what he’s done or forgiveness for what he’s about to do. 

_Karen in tears in the office, and he doesn’t care that she shot a man, he cares that the bastard hurt her. That he pushed her so far into a corner that a curse that should never have activated in a girl was now fully live and haunting her every footstep. He tells her not to be sorry, tells her his secrets, all of them, and promises they will get through this._

Matt and Foggy and Karen, and out of all of them it’s the Catholic Matt who feels the least guilty. Maybe that’s the devil in him talking, but truly he thinks it’s just ordinary human anger. Maybe it’s because he had Father Lantom to talk to. Maybe it’s just that he’s had more time to come to terms with it. Either way he has to reassure them, has to promise that they did the right thing, that they did what they had to. Karen with blood on her hands and death in her shadow, Foggy who broke his family’s most sacred law and followed in the footsteps of the ancestor that so wronged Matt’s kin. But they acted out of love, and desperation, not malice or cruelty, and Matt cannot condemn them for it, will not allow them to be sorry.

_Foggy binds them together, although it was Matt’s idea. A marriage as true or truer than many in the church. Matt and Foggy and Karen, and it goes beyond love, although there is love there, beyond magic although magi was used. It’s loyalty and trust, and forever, and it feels so good not to be alone in his head with the demon, just as he suspects Karen takes comfort in not having to walk alone at night with only her shadow for company._

Matt isn’t sorry. There is a devil chained in his soul, and though he keeps it shackled, does not give it an inch, he doesn’t wish it gone. He and Fisk have that one thing in common. A willingness to use their own darkness to make their home better. He hates everything Fisk stands for, he hates his methods, he hates his goals, and he hates his ideology. But he can at least respect the fact that Fisk doesn’t look away. That he sees something is wrong and he chooses to act against it. The trouble is that Fisk has lost sight of what is really important, has let the devil in his soul bleed into his mind like an infection, has let it whisper, and snarl, and warp his perceptions. He claims to love this city, but he’s forgotten what a city is. It isn’t a place on the map, boundary lines, and government officials, and art galleries, and fundraisers. A city is the people, but demons don’t care for people. If Fisk’s plan to gentrify Hell’s Kitchen succeeds, driving out the ordinary people, breaking up the communities, replacing them with sleek shiny office blocks and apartments for the rich, he will have destroyed the city far more thoroughly than the alien invasion ever did.

_There was something off about Fisk’s lover, Matt could see it from the television. The teeth in her smile were too sharp, he didn’t know what it meant but it made him uneasy. There was something off about Fisk’s second as well. He didn’t smell quite human, that day in the office, and his voice was far too even. He wasn’t surprised when Karen told him the man hadn’t bled red. It wasn’t just Fisk’s supporters either. Growing up the only other person he’d ever met with any understanding of Magic had been Stick, now he notices them everywhere, curse victims, witches, fae, fucking Norse Gods for Christ’s sake. Something’s changing, Matt can smell it, he thinks Karen and Foggy can too, something’s changing and he hopes their bond will be enough to hold them steady._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm thinking I may touch base with either Karen or Fisk next chapter


	10. Angel of mercy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Claire is a nurse, not a healer. No matter what she used to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a fair bit longer than my standard chapters, but it turns out Claire's backstory needed a bit more explaining than I expected and it sort of spiralled.

_Upon examining the patient it is important to first ascertain the severity of the injury and decide whether sutures are needed. If sutures are necessary, it is vital to sterilize the equipment in order to prevent infection. Boiling at a high temperature, or cleansing with high proof alcohol can both be used to this purpose._

Healers didn’t become nurses, or doctors, or paramedics. They didn’t work in hospitals, or sterilise their equipment, or use complex medical machinery, or deal with hundreds of patients in a week. Healing was magic not medicine and Claire _hated_ it.

_Learn your patient, love your patient, know your patient. Breathe together, hold together, let the power flow through you into them. Woodsmoke, and incense, lights turned down to make the auras clearer. Naked from the waist up and all painted with the signs of old and dangerous Gods. Let it, let them, flow through you, to make and to mend, with a rush of euphoria and a disconnect from the world, addictive, exhilarating. That’s the power girl, that’s the kind of power only a healer knows, granddaughter of mine. It’s a part of you._

Claire was healer born. Her mother, her father, her grandparents. Healing spells, and healing power passed down through blood and teaching. Individualised, unverified, every case, every working as different as fingerprints. Health brought about with arbitrary judgement, and intellectual dishonesty, and Claire _hated_ it. She hated how personal it was, hated how even the strongest healer only had the strength for one or two patients a week. She hated how when the healing was performed it came so easily to the patient that they learned nothing from the pain. They would injure themselves through their own stupidity, and then after she’d made the wound vanish as though it was never there, they’d forget about it, and go back out. Carry on exactly as they were, and come back with worse injuries that they expected her to kiss better, until one day they broke themselves too badly for her to fix.

_Once the needle and thread are sterilised, stitch the two edges of the wound together, tying off each stitch with a surgeon’s knot. Apply antiseptic, after completion, and then bandage the wound._

Medicine was hard, it meant years of training and long shifts, and bloody painful work, for too little pay and not enough thanks, and Claire loved it like breathing even as she cursed and grumbled about it. Medicine was hard, hard and thankless, and healing came so very easy. That was the trap, Claire knew that was the trap. Healing was easy, too easy. Easy to break, easy to mend, and pain was only real if she let it be real. But it was magic not medicine, and magic has it’s own price. Magic always has a price, and the price is always blood, pay with your own or pay with someone elses, but you always pay in the end. It was nothing that Claire wanted and everything she craved, and none of her family understood why she tried to fight it.

_Listen close girl, healing is a gift, a gift to you from the powers that move in this world, a gift from you to the people you heal. Symbolism and intent give it form and power, and the outlines always matter more than the details. What’s important is that you respect your gift, the responsibility of it, to do otherwise is shameful and I’ll not have you shaming yourself that way._

Claire ran away to the city, and became a nurse. Studied medicine, how to fix people the hard way, the right way. How to use knowledge, and stitches, and hard work to put people back together. Pushed the gift she never asked for to the back of a metaphorical cupboard and tried not to think about it. Working as a nurse is hard and thankless, but her reward is knowing that in her own small way she is making a difference, that she is helping people fix _themselves._ Fixing people the hard way leaves scars, marks, on bone, and skin, and hearts, and that’s as it should be. Scars are a reminder, of trials overcome, and mistakes made, of lessons learned and strength found. Magical healing steals all of that from people, leaves them to make the same mistakes over and over, to forget just how much strength they found in adversity. It’s a cheat, and a shortcut, and she doesn’t understand why no-one else sees it.

_If the wound is deep it may need to be re-opened and cleaned in order to prevent infection. Stitches should be reapplied once the wound has been thoroughly irrigated. If there is swelling or inflammation, antibiotics should be prescribed._

Claire was healer born, magic swirled around her family like smoke ‘round a forest fire, and still they didn’t see it. Candles, and blood, and herbs that would be poisonous if anyone else was using them, paint the power in broad strokes and roll the dice, and nothing real is ever that easy. Magic always has a cost, and yet they didn’t realise how that applied to them, that their healings must be extracting their own price one way or another. Claire was healer born and her family liked to think they were close to nature, but they couldn’t see that sickness and injury were as much a part of nature as life itself. They couldn’t see how much they stole from people, when they made wounds and illnesses seem like a passing dream. They couldn’t see how it _changed_ people. It changed people knowing their injuries would be healed in a moment, and it changed people knowing that they could heal people in a moment.

_If you do it right even the worst injuries will vanish overnight as they sleep. You can spare them pain suffering, misery, that’s your gift and your duty girl. No-one should have to suffer, you believe that don’t you? For miles around no-one has to fear sickness, or pain, or the vagracies of the healthcare system. Just think girl, if it weren’t for us, half of these people, our neighbours, would be sent into bankruptcy the first time one of their children needed an operation. It’s our duty, our power, and if they choose to help and support us because of it then it’s only fair, it’s only what’s due._

There had been a little boy, the first she’d ever healed. He fell down a well when he was four and she was five. His name was Mike. They’d sneaked off together to explore, just the two of them. He fell down a well and broke his leg, and seeing him cry had awakened her latent healer instincts. She’d fixed his leg in minutes, good as new, and everyone had been so proud of her. That was the first time she healed him, it wasn’t the last. There was a second and third time, and a fourth, she stopped counting after that. There were small petty healings for cuts and scrapes and bruises, there were bigger ones for broken bones and skin sliced deep. They’d stayed close, reckless, daring Mike, and practical, headstrong Claire, and when she was fourteen and he was thirteen, he’d asked her to be his girlfriend. They’d been happy for a while, three bright summers, and the both of them had felt unstoppable.

They pushed the boundaries, both of them. They ran wild, danger was for other people, never them. Adrenaline junkie, that was the term, more Mike than Claire, but Claire wouldn’t have gone with him if she hadn’t wanted it, needed it, craved it. They would do things they knew were dangerous, because they were dangerous, because it was a rush and they believed they were bulletproof. She couldn’t say where is started, maybe it all started back when she was five and he was four and they’d just learned that broken bones were optional. And maybe it was innocent to start with, just a bit of youthful high spirits, but as they got older and the risks got ever more extreme, it began to develop a dark edge. Every risk was like a dare to the whole world to take a shot, and she wasn’t sure if either of them cared what would happen if someone took that dare.

They’d thought they were bulletproof, and sometimes Claire wonders if they weren’t hoping for something to prove them wrong. Nothing ever caused permanent damage, and because of that it sometimes felt as though nothing was real. Nothing touched them and nothing marked them, they pushed for the wall of their own limitations and only found more empty air in front of them. It ate away at them somewhere inside, a feeling they had no words for, that they could only see reflected in each other’s eyes. They walked through the bad parts of town because they could, started fights they couldn’t win, jumped off tall buildings and cliffs with nothing but a homemade parachute and a prayer.

_If there is a foreign object embedded in the wound, such as a knife or a piece of glass, it is not recommended that the object be removed, as removal can increase blood loss and cause further damage._

Things came to their inevitable conclusion. It was a motorbike accident in the end, too fast, too reckless, on icy roads when no-one sane would have been riding. Mike was dead on impact. Neck bent at right angles, eyes glazed over, Claire was concussed, in shock, bleeding from cuts full of glass and gravel. She crawled over to him, put her hands on him to fix him like she always did, they’d crashed before she knew the drill, except this time he wasn’t breathing, and his heart had stopped, and even she couldn’t bring back the dead. She screamed then, screamed to the grey sky and the empty road, and the dead body of her lover, her friend, the little boy who fell down a well when he was four.

When she got home, her family told her not to blame herself. Mike died on impact, there was nothing to be done. They said not to blame herself, and she didn’t. At least not the way they thought. She didn’t blame herself for failing to heal him. She blamed herself for ever healing him in the first place. It had been a long walk home alone, with too much time to think, and she understood now what she hadn’t known when she was five, and hadn’t thought about when she was fourteen. Mike had been reckless, so beautifully terribly reckless, and it was her that made him that way. She had taught him, with actions not with words, that danger couldn’t touch him, she had taught him that pain was only ever momentary, that injuries would only last as long as it took for her to touch him.

From that day when he was four and she was five until that day when she was seventeen and he was sixteen, they’d been invulnerable, a study in what happens to children who find themselves immune to consequences. She could see it all too clearly now, the power had warped the both of them, and now Mike was dead by the side of the road because of it, and the worst thing was that there was no other way it could have ended. That dark desperation, that need for something, anything to break through the numbness, its roots were buried in a four year old’s broken leg, and watered with every cut and scrape and bruise since. She wondered how many of their other neighbours had been so damaged by perfect safety. She wondered how many of her relatives had been warped by the power to keep those they cared for safe from all harm great and small.

_You can heal anything except death girl. The dead are dead, and are not within our power. Our business is with the living. Our duty and our power lie with the living. Don’t dwell on the dead, there’s enough to do keeping the living well._

And now that she saw she could not unsee. Her family’s relations with their neighbours were toxic. Some resented them, hated them for how much they needed them, while others loved them, clung to them, worshipful and needy, but all depended on them. It was duty and it was power. Physical pain, physical sickness, they existed only as a sign of her family’s displeasure, and as everyone knows power corrupts. Some of their family resented their neighbours for their dependency, just as much as their neighbours resented them, while others liked that dependency a little too much, and everywhere the tension grew.

She’d tried to tell them, but no-one wanted to hear. Healing was too easy, suffering was too hard and change would have required sacrifices no-one was willing to make. She’d tried to tell them but they wouldn’t listen. They’d been angry with her for even bringing it up, and in the end she’d given up. She’d washed her hands of them and left. Left the toxic interdependency, left the memories of Mike that haunted every street, left the place where mistakes were brushed under the rug before anyone could learn from them. She’d left for New York, and sworn never to look back. She’d signed up for nurse training, with a kind of grim satisfaction at the scandal it would have caused back home, and she’d learned to do things the hard way, they way that anything that matters ought to be done.

_When the wound is sufficiently healed it is important to remove the stitches as any left in the skin could act as a source of future infection. They should be cut and removed from the flesh as cleanly as possible._

She’d put her magic and healing away, and learned to help people through medicine instead, and she’d never once been tempted until she found a man dying in a dumpster, that she dared not take back to a hospital. A man who healed too fast to be ordinary, but not fast enough to save him, not without surgery, and medicine, and a hospital. She knew who he was without asking, knew he was in trouble, and knew that if his injuries didn’t kill him outright, whatever caused them would. So she broke the vow she made when she was seventeen and done with easy answers, and she healed him. Not all the way, not enough so he’d know what she could do, but enough so that he could get up and fight if he needed to, because she knew he would.

_Healing is in our blood and bones girl, in all of our family. You can’t deny it, it will always be in you, and whatever promises and oaths you might make, however hard you may try to run, mark my words, you_ will _use it again._

He had his own secrets that much was for certain, he healed to fast, and moved too fast, and fought crime _blind_ , and when they tortured the Russian together he’d told the man he loved it, low and vicious and his words had a ring of uncomfortable truth about them. She’d called him Mike, she needed to call him something, and giving the first man she’d healed in years the same name as the first she’d ever healed seemed to fit. Up on that roof it fit even better and as they tortured a man she had uncomfortable flashbacks to the darker days with the first Mike. She wondered if this was something she and original Mike would have ended up doing, for kicks rather than justice, if in the end their own risk, and their own pain wouldn’t have been enough. New Mike was bringing out parts of herself she’d buried with her magic and Old Mike. She guessed it was true what they said, magic never lets you run forever. Normal people could make a fresh start, but with magic in your blood and bones, all you could ever have was a temporary reprieve, because magic loves the story and the story never lets a dark and troubled past go to waste.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think I'm going to do another chapter for Karen next.


	11. Grim tales

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ben is a storyteller. In a world governed by narrative law, this is not insignificant.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This ended up a bit meta I think. It kinda works as a concept though.

_Once upon a time…_

No

_Not yesterday, not yesterday, but long ago a thing occurred…_

Again no, not quite.

_Behind seven lands and seas, there lived…_

No, still not right.

There’s as many ways of starting a tale as there are tales to be told. It’s easier, when you aren’t part of it though. When you can in all conscience place the story long ago and far away, a safe and comfortable distance from your audience. When the characters are heroes, and knights, and monsters and dragons and immortal because of it. The traditional beginnings, they all mean long ago and far away, and while they may hold lessons for the listener, they are always twisted up in metaphor and subtext.

Ben was a reporter though, and so his stories were always here and now, in a place you know, with people just like you, and horrors half a step away from your own front door. For that the comfort of the traditional openings will not serve, cannot serve, because his duty as a reporter is to strip away comfort, strip away lies. To tell the truth laid bare, inescapable, so that like it or no, people cannot help but listen.

So

_Here and now, in the places you do not look, in between the cracks of everyday life, dark things are moving. Today, and yesterday, and most likely tomorrow, the old magics are stirring and the story has a power all its own._

Close enough. Above all else Ben is a storyteller, to him, the magic in the world is self evident. Self evident, and beautiful in the way of a forest fire, or a lightning bolt.

_Here and now, see a pretty girl in trouble, see her hungry shadow, see it move on its own out the corner of your eye. Here and now, see the taint settling over the city as the mad king, the dark overlord, tightens his grip. See the man Wilson Fisk of the television, see the hellfire burning behind his eyes and know that he is no man._

Ben knows the stories. He knows them from his father, from his grandmother, from his aunts. A gift for words, and a touch of the sight, a couple of centuries earlier and he’d have been wandering from village to village, telling tales of kings, and brave knights in armour. But here and now he’s a reporter, and the story he has to tell is altogether too close to home.

_There are monsters in hells kitchen, and heroes. See if you can spot the difference. See demons peering out from behind human eyes, see shadows that grow stronger in the presence of death, see a taint settle over the city you love with the instincts that mark a teller-of-tales. The Devil of hell’s kitchen, Wilson Fisk, Karen Page, Matt Murdock, Foggy Nelson, a hundred other heroes and monsters, walking the streets of Hell’s Kitchen. Legends that look just like ordinary men and women, except for those with the eyes to see._

Doris is dying. He loves her, and she’s dying. He would have abandoned it all for her. If she had asked it of him, he would have written no more articles, told no more stories, he would have pretended not to see the narrative flow, the fairytale patterns that grew ever stronger with each passing year. But she didn’t ask it. Doesn’t ask it. She knows what he is and she doesn’t ask it, doesn’t consider it. He’s not sure why he had ever thought she would. She always loved stories. The old ones about Anansi the spider god, and Coyote the trickster, and Prometheus who stole fire for humanity’s sake. And the new ones, about vicious businessmen, and corrupt politicians, and the brave human people (not ordinary, never ordinary, because the courage to act is a rare and special thing), who dare to stand against them, to speak the truth and tell their stories and in doing so topple giants. No Doris would never ask him to stop.

_And the heroes slay the monsters, they always do, but no one can promise a minor character’s safety. Ben is not just a teller, he is a part of the story, and so he finds himself facing a demon dressed in meat and bones, with nothing but his laptop and his words to protect him. See the demon, taste his hunger on the air, blood hunger, blood desire, twisted and wrong and as compelling as the swaying of a cobra before it strikes. Feel the threads of the story and know that this is where you die, fuel for the fires of greater heroes. Feel the threads of the story warp, because Wilson Fisk is a clever man and he tries so hard to redraw himself as the hero of the narrative. It could work, heroes and villains are all in how the story is told after all, but Ben is the storyteller and so with his last moments, his last heartbeats he weaves the threads. Weaves and spins and unravels and forces them into shape so that Fisk can never be anything but the villain of the piece. The story will take care of the rest. Vengeance from beyond the grave._

Ben is a storyteller, and manipulating the narrative is his bread and butter. With the world as it is, more bound by the threads of narrative than it has been in the last hundred years, casting Fisk as the villain is its own death sentence in the hero tale this is becoming. It’s an empty hollow vengeance, worthy of its own tragic tale, but it’s all he can do. No time to say farewell to Doris, to give a final piece of advice to Karen, to bring Fisk’s criminal activities to light. All he can do in the moments before death is strike his own blow to bring down his murderer.

_And they all lived happily ever after_

But that’s not how this ends. Not even for the heroes. This is a hero tale not a fairy story. Beowulf died to slay the dragon, Odysseus won at Troy then faced a hard ten years trying to go home, the children of Lir became human again and immediately felt the full weight of their years. Karen and Foggy and Matt won, they won but the damage won’t fade so easily. Fisk is gone but the scars he left on the city will be a long time healing.

_A bell rang and the tale came to its end._

But that’s not it either, because it isn’t ended, not really. There’s a thousand dark things awakening with the magic that has been dormant a hundred years and more, and there are many more stories to unwind before the bell can ring.

_Three apples fall from the sky, one for the heroes, one for the storyteller, and one for those who listen and learn._

And maybe that’s the truest ending there is, not a full stop, not an ending. But a point at which something can be taken away from the narrative, the apple if you will. And it’s a different thing to take away depending on whether you hear the story, weave the story, or are yourself woven in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case it wasn't clear, Ben is from a long line of storytellers, this gives him a certain ability to... manipulate the narrative. It turns out there are layers upon layers of people trying to mess Fisk up. Between Matt's open assault, Foggy's curse, and Ben's manipulation of the plot of the universe to put him in a bad position the guy barely stood a chance. I almost feel bad.  
> This fic has officially turned into a monster that i've given up all hope of controlling. I'm halfway through watching S2 and i'm already trying to work out how to fit Frank and Electra in.


	12. That which haunts my steps

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Frank Castle is a haunted man

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Season two spoilers start here. Frank's chapter

“One batch, two batch, penny and dime”, words for the dead. She smiles when he says them, just like she smiles when he pulls the trigger, when the blood pools around his feet. It’s not a nice smile. A dark, twisted, parody of the innocent smiles she used to give when she was alive and the words were just a bedtime story.

_One batch_

No-one else sees her. He thinks. Maybe their victims do, in those moments before the light leaves their eyes. But no-one else. She wears a pretty white dress that she never owned in life, and there’s never a drop of blood on her, not a speck of dirt. A pretty little pristine angel, but her eyes are as black as the space between stars and her smile is full of knives.

She doesn’t speak. Frank isn’t entirely sure she can. A lot of the old stories about ghosts describe them as silent apparitions. It doesn’t matter. She’s still perfectly able to make her desires clear. It’s why he laughs when people ask him if his family would have wanted this. He laughs, hollow and more than half insane, because he can’t speak for Frank junior or Maria, but they aren’t the ones haunting him. They’re gone, smoke on the wind and he can only assume that means they’re at rest, that they’ve found peace and moved on. Lisa though, Lisa haunts his every step, and she smiles as he washes the streets of Hell’s Kitchen in the blood of her killers. Smiles with a mouth full of knives, and a look in her eyes that is so very far from human. He kills for her sake as much as anything, because she is angry, and restless, and hungry for blood, and she is all he has left. She is his daughter and he loves her, and so he pours out offerings of blood and death and vengeance onto the streets of the city, and does not flinch at the sight of her black and empty eyes.

_Two batch_

Sometimes, in black moments, when the bloodstains won’t come out and the bastards won’t show their faces, he wonders if she really is his Lisa. If she isn’t just some unholy apparition taken the form of his daughter to manipulate him. He tried to tell himself his little girl would never have been so bloodthirsty, so cruel but he knows that’s lying to himself. It’s Lisa. He knows his own daughter, and maybe she was nothing like this when she lived, but what happened changed him, it would be the worst kind of self-deception to pretend it wouldn’t change her.

The sheer magnitude of what was taken from her, a life, a future, a mother, a brother, ice-cream in the park, teenaged crushes, friends, lovers, maybe a husband and children of her own. And she is old enough to know it as well. Old enough to see in those moments before her death all the things she would never see, never do, never have, old enough to _hate_ the men that stole it all from her.

_Penny_

Everyone knows how hate and rage can twist a spirit, how they warp more the longer they linger in this world, trapped between. At least that’s what all the stories say, the old stories people tell to children, the new ones that are whispered between people who ought to know better and are alive because they don’t. Before all this Frank had never seen anything that couldn’t be explained away be science, or madness, or a trick of the light, but he’d heard things here and there, while overseas, from people he otherwise trusted and he’d wondered. He doesn’t wonder anymore. Lisa is more than a sign of madness, nevermind that no-one else sees her. She’s pointed him to things he’d never have found, warned him of attacks from behind, found targets that he had no other way of seeing. She’s real.

_And_

There was something about Red. Something that reminded him a little of Lisa. That same predatory edge concealed under the form of humanity. Red smiles at violence the way Lisa does when Frank paints the walls with blood and bullets, and he doesn’t understand why Red held back and baulked at killing when Lisa only ever urges him on. The smile is the same whether Red is in the costume or a smart suit, and he wonders why no-one else sees it. He could understand civilians missing it, they find it hard to look past the blindness, but anyone with any knowledge of the world beyond the strictly real should know that there’s more than one way to see, for those with the right power.

Red confused him. The woman, Page, she made more sense to him. She’d killed, it was in her eyes, and in her voice, even if Lisa hadn’t told him. She’d killed, and she wasn’t sorry, and he suspected her shadow was as hungry for blood as his own tagalong. He talked to her and only her, because Red was distracted and distracting, and Frank found him equal parts baffling and infuriating, because the other lawyer, Foggy was too hard to read, softness, and danger, power that was never obvious, but always hit where it hurt and he couldn’t quite figure out what it all meant. He didn’t figure it out until much later, it was after all the first time he’d met a witch. He wondered later if maybe he could have asked for Foggy to do something for Lisa. Probably not. He hadn’t got that kind of feeling off Nelson. In any case it was easier just to talk to Karen. Karen was like him, he understood her, trusted her, in ways he couldn’t with the others. He felt a little bad for letting her down at the trial, but Lisa was hungry for blood, and he had to follow the path that would give it to her. Karen would understand, she knew sometimes killing needed to be done. Lisa smiles as they drag him to prison, she knows he’ll feed her soon.

_Dime_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's probably Lisa, but maybe it isn't. Either way it isn't exactly nice. Frank also has a touch of the sight that was only awakened after the incident, which is how he's getting a sense of what Karen, Foggy, and Matt are. He has no prior experience in the world of the supernatural though, so while he gets feelings, and impressions off people he doesn't necessarily know what they mean,


	13. The hand that is dealt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Matt, Karen, and Foggy do a tarot reading for the Punisher, that begins to make sense after Matt and Frank talk face to face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it's been a while. This chapter was a nightmare to write.

It was Karen that suggested the reading. Honestly it was a slightly strange suggestion, it came out of nowhere when Matt told them he was going after the Punisher, and Foggy has suspicions that her Shadow may have been behind it. Powers like that tend to have a certain… sensitivity to the way other powers move in the world, and dark though the Shadow may be it is still _Karen’s_ shadow. If it did pick up on something not right about the Punisher it would push her to find out more.

So Karen suggested the reading. It was Foggy that carried it out though. Score one for formal training, Matt and Karen just sat quietly and watched. Foggy uses the old method, mostly because that’s the one he remembers best, shuffling and reshuffling before laying out the cards with a skill that his hands remembered even if his mind had forgotten.

Matt drew for the Punisher. The man had shed his blood, had held his life in his hands, had _spared_ his life, had followed in Matt’s own footsteps. All these things form a connection between people in the dark places where stories hold power.

The results had been cryptic, as such things often are. So much is dependent on context and interpretation and at the time of the reading none of them, not Foggy with his experience, or Karen with her sensitivity to the shadows, or Matt with his blood and pain connection to the target, had been able to make heads or tails of it. All they could tell for sure was what a quick glance at the arrest reports could have told them. That the Punisher was a very dangerous, very damaged man.

Chains on a rooftop, face to face with the enemy and the cards started to come together. Seven cards, so many meanings, but true interaction between Matt and Frank cast a light on what did and did not apply. Seven cards, the knight of swords, the chariot, the tower, the six of cups, the five of swords, the moon, the five of cups reversed.

The first card drawn was the Knight of swords, a soldiers’ card for an old soldier, and really that much should have been obvious. No-one was that comfortable with military hardware without training. There were other meanings too, but Frank was a soldier right down to the bone, and instinct told Matt his reading was the true one.

Once that became clear it didn’t take long for the next cards to fall into place, if the knight of swords was a soldier than the chariot was a war. A war that Frank was still fighting, would be fighting forever, Matt could tell from the dead tone in his voice and the smell of blood and cordite that clung to his clothes. It was a war against the world, Matt suspected, Frank’s world had turned to nightmares and now he was fighting a lonely war to try and make the pain stop. But it wouldn’t stop, that kind of pain never does. The kind of pain that Matt can taste in every word, ever movement, every breath the Punisher takes. Something terrible had happened to Frank.

And that was the tower. Calamity, disaster, the moment where everything falls apart and nothing makes sense anymore. The tower with the six of cups, so whatever nightmare tragedy was driving Frank, and had created the punisher, it was in the past now, over and done with, something that it was far too late to fix. Of course Matt could read it differently, maybe Frank was the calamity. He’d certainly shed enough blood for it. But magic and fortune-telling was as much about instinct as semantics and Matt had a feeling that underneath it all Frank was a good man pushed over the edge.

The next card only strengthens that reading. The five of swords, grief, loss, destruction, dishonour. If there were a more fitting card for the man he was speaking to then Matt could not think of it. All of that applied and the demon chained inside Matt was snickering at the thought of more of the same to come. It knew the smell of blood on the air, and death soon to follow.

The cards make sense to that point. A soldier, fighting a war, because of something terrible that happened in the past. Haunted by grief and sorrow, and headed for destruction, both his own and that of his enemies.

The last two cards are both the least clear and most frightening. Of course that’s almost always the way of it. There are reasons people fear what they don’t understand. Confusion, and misdirection, and the edges of human understanding, are the gaps through which demons, and curses, and shadows enter the world. And if there is any card that articulates this truth it is the moon. What it means with regard to the punisher is somewhat less clear. It could mean madness. There is no-one but the two of them on this rooftop, but Frank keeps replying to things Matt hasn’t said, keeps turning his head, turning his body, as though he’s holding a conversation with someone that isn’t there. But…

Matt has a sinking feeling that the Punisher is more than just mad. There’s a feeling about him that Matt had failed to recognise when they fought, but is all too clear now that Matt is at his mercy. The worst kind of familiarity, kin to the darkness twisted around his own soul. And yet not quite the same, not the way Fisk was. Frank is familiar the way Karen is familiar, the way Electra had been familiar, though he hadn’t realised it at the time. The darkness around Frank is more than natural, there is almost certainly magic at work around him but for all that his anger is his own, and something in Matt finds that _fascinating._ That a human being could carry enough rage to make a demon pause, it’s enough to make the darkness in his own soul rattle at the chains he binds it with.

Frank’s rage is his own, he’s not demon born, but there is still that familiar feeling of darkness, of magic, and Matt knows the Moon doesn’t show anything as simple or straightforward as mundane madness. It is a warning of occult forces, of things that are not as they seem, that move unseen. The last card ties it all together as soon as Frank speaks to the darkness and calls it Lisa with all the broken grief of a father. The five of cups reversed, the return of a family member, and Matt could happily have gone the whole of his demon cursed life without knowing that, because when the realization set in he could _hear_ her hungry, predatory laughter, could smell the blood that surrounded her, could feel the chill of her presence running through his bones.

His demon was bad enough. His demon, Fisk’s demon, Karen’s shadow, all terrible, but somehow this was worse. A human being, an innocent child twisted to this, and he knows now why ghosts are feared.

But as much as it is something he never wanted to know, it’s something he needs to know. Frank is not alone. His dead walk beside him and whisper in his ear, and there is no living man that could sway him from his course. Frank is dangerous, because he _believes_ in what he is doing, because he _hates_ in a way that would make a demon purr, because he _loves_ and love gives him strength.

Frank wants him to loose the chains that bind the demon inside him, that much is clear. Frank might be running on instinct and half remembered stories but he’s sensitive enough to feel what Matt is holding back, and guess at how to make him let go. God if Frank only knew how close to the edge Matt is. What it takes, every minute of every day not to kill, not to let the demon hollow out the marrow of his bones and fill them with hate and hunger, what it takes not to become the monster. Because Frank doesn’t understand, not really. He’s running on instinct and half remembered stories and he doesn’t know the details. The devil’s in the details.

Frank doesn’t know what he’s dealing with and if he keeps pushing the way he is then they are all going to live to regret it. He’s sensitive enough to know just where to push, and ignorant enough not to know he shouldn’t, and if he keeps going he’s going to push Matt over the edge. He puts a gun in Matt’s hand, threatens to shoot Grotto close too close to where Matt is bound, and the devil in Matt is screaming for blood even as Father Lantom’s warnings ring in his ears. Matt is more afraid in that moment than he has ever been, and he wonders if the knight of swords cares what might happen if he drags Matt’s demon into his war.

It’s a bloody miracle he gets out of there without killing anyone. Fights his way out the hard way and at least the violence helps to quiet his bloodlust for a while. It’s been getting worse. He _needs_ it, more and more with each passing day. It’s a razor fine line he walks the more he gives it the more it wants, but if he doesn’t give it enough that’s when he starts losing control, losing time, losing his mind. Frank doesn’t understand but Matt thinks maybe Lisa, or the thing wearing her face does. At least well enough to use it against him, and the predator instinct Matt tries so hard to keep balanced tells him that whoever she might or might not have been in life, in death she means well to no-one.

In dark moments he wonders if he’s already too far gone. He comes into work late, battered, barely functional, he goes out nearly every night now and it still isn’t enough. Foggy is left holding the cases, the firm, their lives, together, left with the knowledge that one of these days Matt will get himself killed. He goes out and every night he hits harder, stays longer, and he’s no longer sure how much is to protect the victims and how much to feed his own addiction. Matt is on a downward spiral, and he’s dragging Foggy down with him, Karen too, because without them Karen will be left alone with the shadow at her footsteps and he doesn’t like to think of what will become of her if it comes to that, not after seeing what happened to Frank, left alone with something very like kin to Karen’s curse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I need to rewatch S2 before I continue so it may be a while before the next chapter. Sorry. I'll try to update only a thought away within the next week though.

**Author's Note:**

> This didn't turn out at all the way I expected, but I think it kinda works better this way. It gets the idea across without having to rewrite the entire series.


End file.
